Electric Car Battery Cost

            Electric car battery costs have never been revealed to the public—until now.    According to an April 18 Wall Street Journal article by Mike Ramsey, entitled Ford CEO:  Battery is Third of Electric Car Cost, the CEO of Ford Motor Company, speaking at Fortune Magazine’s Brainstorm Green conference, said that the battery pack for an electric Ford Focus costs between $12,000 and $15,000.   He said, “When you move to an all electric vehicle, the battery size moves up to around 23 kilowatt hours, and it weighs around 600 to 700 pounds.  They’re around $12,000 to $15,000 [per battery] for a type of car that normally sells for about $22,000, [referring to the price of the gas powered Focus] so you can see why the economics are what they are.”

            Since the electric Focus sells for $39,200, the battery cost alone accounts for a third of the cost of the car.  The all electric Nissan Leaf price starts at $35,000, and the Chevy Volt, a plug-in hybrid, sells for about $40,000.   But at these prices, none of these cars will achieve much market penetration. The plug-in hybrid and the full electric car will remain niche products until the price of batteries comes down. That’s both good news and bad news.  It’s bad news because this means it’s unlikely that we will see much action in electric cars in the next year or two.  But it’s good news in that, though the price of batteries has to drop, it does not have to drop by orders of magnitudes.  The present price is about five or six hundred bucks per kilowatt hour of capacity.  If they could just get it down to about a third of that figure, I think we’d be home free.

            The Dept of Energy, which is subsidizing the building of battery factories, hopes to bring the price down to $300 /kwh by next year. They apparently feel that this figure would be a tipping point, and it might be.   Part of the high cost of the electric Focus is that even though they build this car on the same production line that builds the regular Focus, they make so few of them that they have all of the cost disadvantages of a “limited edition, handmade car.”  But if falling battery price were to allow them to drop the price to $32,000, then the radical increase in sales would allow sufficient economies of scale to drop the price by another $10,000, and this would place it in the price range of the cheap family car.  Remember, as rising gas prices create a market demand for non-petroleum cars, it is probably not the Cadillac buyers who really worry about the price of gas.  The natural market for electric cars is with people who feel they can’t afford to pay $4.00/gal for gas.  But if you can’t afford four dollar gas, then you probably can’t afford a $40,000 car.  But if the cost of these high tech batteries follows the same trajectory as other high tech electrical equipment, we may expect, over time, to see sharp decreases in price, once the market expands.

            When we get to the point that the typical new Ford sold is an electric vehicle, we will have traveled full circle to where Henry Ford wanted to go in the first place.  The gasoline powered cars that Henry put on the market were not his first choice in propulsion systems. Since Henry had been a supervisor of a power house before he went into the car business, an electric car would have been his first choice. But at that time, the available batteries were not up to the task. At one point, Ford hired Thomas Edison’s company to develop a better battery, but the best Edison could come up with, an advanced NiCad, could still not store sufficient energy per pound.  But today, we have the right battery.  And soon, we will have it at the right price.

             So; when will the electric car begin to change your life?   It already has.   Or, to be more precise, the “threat” of the electric car has changed your life.   For many decades, Detroit was content to offer us the same old V-8 engines and three speed transmissions. Product development was all about different styles of fins, and a little more chrome. But that was then and this is now. The modern, front-wheel-drive, four cylinder car delivers efficiency beyond anything we imagined 20 years ago.   In WWII, the “holy grail” of engine design was to build an engine that could deliver one horsepower per cubic inch of displacement.  And only the P-51 Mustang ever achieved this standard, and it did it with a supercharged engine with compression so high that it ran on 150 octane fuel.   In 2003, I bought a new Ford Focus with a 100 cubic inch engine which was rated at 120 hp.  This is a small in-line 4-cylinder engine, with no supercharger, that runs on regular gas, and was available in Ford’s cheapest cars.

             And yesterday, I traded in my 1995 Ford Escort for a new Ford Focus. Even with 287,000 miles on it, the Escort still runs fine, and I received a decent trade-in allowance on it. (And since I was trading in a Ford on another Ford, I got a Ford buyers loyalty bonus.)  In all the 17 years I’ve driven the Escort, I’ve done very little to it other than put gas and oil in it. It’s never had the head off, and other than totally rebuilding the brakes at 200,000 miles, no major mechanical work has ever been done. It even has the original exhaust system.  My only complaint was that it had only very modest amounts of acceleration.  (I don’t remember what it would do from zero to 60, but in measuring this, you don’t actually use a stop-watch—you use a calendar.)

            But the new Focus I just bought, with its little 2 liter engine, delivers 160 hp.   And with a six-speed automatic transmission, it has acceleration adequate for anyone except a maniac. I pulled onto the freeway entrance ramp from a dead stop, and was doing 70 when I got off the ramp and merged into the traffic.)  For me, that’s good enough.  And yet this thing has an EPA fuel rating of 37 mpg average, and maximum highway mileage up to 44mpg.  And this is a comfortable, four-door family car.  What I’m trying to say--is that American cars have gotten better—radically better.  That means that Detroit has actually spent serious money improving engine efficiency.   Why did they finally do this?  They looked in their rear view mirror, and what they saw creeping up behind them was the electric car.  And it scared the hell out of them. 

Is Nuclear Power Powerful?

              For over forty years, I have been an advocate of sustainable energy.   This was in spite of the fact that, as an electrician, I spent most of my working life building powerhouses.  I have worked on coal burners, nukes, and even trash burning powerhouses. But throughout that time, I always felt that there was a better way; a sustainable way.  Whenever I would argue this, people would be skeptical as to whether sustainable energy could ever supply the voracious demands of modern living.  And I never found a simple and convincing way to explain that it easily could.

            Then recently I was driving on I 380 between Waterloo and Cedar Rapids, and off to my right I noticed the white, puffy column of steam and hot air rising from cooling tower of the nuclear power station at Palo, Iowa.   And I also noticed that the sky that day was nearly covered with white, puffy cumulus clouds that had occurred naturally.

            The Palo Nuke has been there 40 years, and is Iowa’s first and only nuke, and the second powerhouse I ever helped to build.   At full power, it produces just under 500 megawatts.  And the steam cloud that rises from its cooling tower is about the size one expects from that size reactor.   You see, for any given set of atmospheric conditions, there is a fixed relationship between the size of reactor and the size of the steam cloud.   A nuke is a heat engine, and its efficiency limited by the Carnot equation.  (Efficiency is equal to the absolute temperature of the heat source, minus the absolute temperature of the heat sink, all over the absolute temperature of the source.)  Since there are limits to the maximum temperature that a steam turbine can withstand, and since a heat sink much colder than ambient air is unlikely, this means that in the real world, no more than about 40% of the heat energy can be harvested as mechanical power.   The heat generated by the nuclear reaction produces steam, which flows through the turbine and is then condensed in a condenser cooled by water from the cooling tower.  This coolant water absorbs heat from the waste steam and becomes warmer, only to be re-cooled as some of it is evaporated in the cooling tower.  In the cooling tower, the warm coolant water flows over open slats, like a huge venetian blind, as ambient air is blown through it.  Evaporation takes place, and that’s where most of the heat goes.  In fact, except for the 40% of the original heat energy that is converted into mechanical power to drive the generator, nearly all of the heat is lost to evaporation. The more heat the nuclear reaction produces, the more heat removed by evaporation in the cooling tower, and the bigger the cloud produced.

            I wrote that rather tedious paragraph to establish one point:  In any heat engine large enough to have a cooling tower, you can tell the size of the heat source by the size of the cloud arising from the cooling tower.  But the atmosphere is also a heat engine, and behaves by the same rules.  As I have stated, on this day the entire sky was filled, from horizon to horizon, with cumulus clouds.  And the solar energy required to boil moisture out of the ground to produce those clouds is precisely the same, for every gram of water, as the heat required at the Palo Nuke cooling tower.   To evaporate a gram of water always takes precisely 540 calories. While the size of cloud produced for any level of power will vary from day to day because of local atmospheric conditions, both the power house and the cloud bank are using the same air on the same day.  I stopped my car on the road shoulder, and as I looked at the clouds I estimated that the small plume rising from the nuke was less that a hundredth of the total cloud mass which I could see, just in the small patch of sky visible where I was standing.  Not all of the solar energy striking the earth evaporates water. Most of it warms the ground, and some of it is reflected back into space.  But just the small amount that was boiling water out of the ground, in just that area, had a hundred times as much energy as the nuke.  And yet people continue to question whether renewable sources can supply our needs.  Are they insane?

Cheap Sugar From Cellulose.

    According to the January 3 issue of Wall Street Journal,  German chemical giant BASF is investing 30 million dollars in a plant in Pennsylvania that will produce cheap sugar from hardwood cellulose.  The sugar is not intended for human consumption,  but to be used as a chemical feed stock for producing acrylic plastic.  This plastic is now made from Brazilian cane sugar.

No More Cheap Oil

               The May 24^th issue of Wall Street Journal has an article entitled Facing up To End of “Easy Oil.” (I would provide a hot link but you’d just hit a pay wall.)   The article describes an oil extraction project in Wafra, along the Kuwait /Saudi Arabia border.  The project is using injected steam to recover very viscous, heavy crude oil.   The oil is as thick as molasses, and without steam, it would be unrecoverable.   Using steam to recover heavy oil is nothing new, but usually this is done in places where a source of fresh water to feed the boilers, and cheap natural gas to fire them are both available.   This area has neither.  For water, they are pumping salt water out of the same formation that contains the oil, desalinating it, and then heating it with imported LNG.

              Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are jointly developing this field, with the cooperation of Chevron Oil.   And Chevron is putting up the capital.  If they succeed in extracting oil, the oil they get will be low grade oil that is extremely expensive to refine into any useful product. So why are they even bothering to do this?  Of course, they wouldn’t be doing it—if they had any better alternatives.  For several decades, that part of the world dominated world oil trade not just because they had vast amounts of oil, but also because the oil they had was easy to extract and easy to refine. But those days are over.

            All the great Saudi oil fields, including the Ghawar field, are well past their prime. They will continue to produce oil, but in decreasing amounts.  And the fact that the Saudis and Chevron would even consider a project such as Wafra shows that there aren’t many options left.

            The world is passing, (or has already passed) the point of peak oil production. That means that half of all the oil we started with is now gone.  Of course, the other half is still there, and we can burn it. But there’s a catch.  When our fathers and grandfathers took the first half, they took the easy half.   If some oil was technically easy to extract and some was not, they took what was easy.  If some was in convenient locations and some was not, they took what was close. If some oil was cheap to refine and some was not, they ignored the heavy and skimmed off the light. If some was located in countries that were agreeable to doing business with us and some were hostile, they went where they were welcome.  In short, they did what we would do—they picked the low hanging fruit.  So while half the oil is still there, from now till the end of the oil age we can expect to spend astronomical sums to extract nearly useless oil in remote locations, some of which will be so hostile (think Nigeria) that every oil field will be a battle field.  But with a billion Chinese and another billion Indians who have now entered the world oil market, this oil will be extracted.  But don’t expect any of it to be cheap. 

Bald Eagles Galore!

            Today I saw something I’ve never seen before in my life, and never expected to see—a large “flock” of migrating bald eagles.    At this time of the year, in the upper Mississippi valley region, it is normal to see bald eagles migrating northward along the Mississippi and its tributaries.  But I’ve never seen a large flock of them.  I was not aware that they ever traveled in flocks.

            But today, at about noon, while driving along a stretch of I-380 near the Cedar River, between Gilbertville, Iowa and Evansdale, Iowa, I looked up and saw a flock of large, dark- colored birds--at least 50 and perhaps 100 of them.  They were at about 300 ft, and were circling in a pattern where the whole flock slowly circles as a group, much as pelicans do when migrating.  I recognized immediately that each individual bird had the unmistakable silhouette of an eagle, yet I refused to believe that these were eagles, because I’ve never seen them behave that way. As far as I know, we now have 4 nesting pair in the Gilbertville area, but that would only account for the first 8 of them.   If you were to stake out a particularly good eagle watching post at this time of year along the Mississippi, perhaps between Dubuque and Lacrosse, you might easily sight a total of a fifty birds in the course of a day.  But you would not see a “flock” of fifty birds. Eagles don’t travel in flocks—at least they didn’t until now.

            As I watched the circling hoard, the sun angle caught them such that I was sure I saw a white area on the head and tail of each bird.  Just then, two birds peeled off from the flock and swooped down right in front of my car.  It was two of the biggest, most beautiful bald eagles I’ve ever seen.  I think they were pursuing some pigeons that had just flown across the road a little earlier, but since I was driving in traffic, I lost contact. I did not see if they actually got any pigeons.

            Perhaps flocking is a completely normal behavior for the species, but few people of my generation or even my father’s generation ever witnessed it because their numbers were so depleted that there was never a sufficient concentration anywhere to form a flock.  When I was a child, I never saw an eagle.  And as recently as 20 years ago, seeing one eagle was a rare treat, to be experienced once or twice a year.   In the past several years we have had a few nesting pair and we watch them year round.  But today I saw a flock, and it was beautiful! 

U.S. Gov't Grain Stocks Now Zero.

            Syndicated farm columnist Alan Guebert tells us that the United States government now holds no grain reserves whatsoever.  At one time, back in the 1950s, the U.S. government, through its Commodity Credit Corporation, held billions of bushels of wheat, corn (maize), soybeans, cotton, dried milk, and other agricultural commodities.  Most Americans probably assume that this is still the case, but they assume incorrectly.

            The government became involved in the grain business in the 1930s, as part of the Roosevelt administration’s program to stabilize commodity prices.  The government opened a commodity loan program, which was basically a pawn shop.  If a farmer harvested his grain at a time when prices were disastrously low, instead of selling his crop at that time he could offer his stored grain as collateral for a government loan, with the loan value of the grain set by Congress.  If the market price later rose, he could pay off the loan plus interest, reclaim his grain, and then sell it at the higher price.  If the price stayed the same or went even lower, he could pay back the loan by simply allowing the government to keep the grain.  This program helped farmers in times of low market prices by giving them an alternative to selling produce at prices well below the cost of production.  The loan rate for each kind of grain was set low, but not so low that a farmer would go broke by selling at that price.

            But just as a pawn shop eventually accumulates a lot of guitars and wedding rings, a commodity loan program eventually own billions of bushels grain.  In years of overproduction, many farmers deliberately forfeit their grain rather than redeem it, and government stores increase.  In years of crop shortfalls and high prices, the government could always sell off some of its grain to prevent prices from going higher.  So the program had the effect of stabilizing prices, which was its purpose.  At a time when the United States regularly grew more food than we could usually eat or sell, there was a tendency for grain stores to continually increase.  Defenders of the program felt that this was not a bad thing, since, if we ever had a serious drought, no one would be hungry.  Critics saw the ever growing hoard of government grain as proof that the program was unworkable.  So to counter the built-in bias toward accumulation, the government imposed limits on the percentage of a farmer’s acreage that could be used to grow any particular grain.  For a couple generations, America’s farm program regulated the supply and price of many commodities by continually adjusting the loan rate and the acreage allotment.  And these vast stores of grain insured not only that Americans would never be hungry, but also offered a degree of food security to our overseas customers.

            But the critics, some of whom were farmers, observed that any price floor above the cost of production becomes an effective price ceiling, as production would expand without limit as long as farmers were assured that every additional bushel of grain produced could be sold for at least what it cost.   It was argued that while the price floor established by the loan rate kept farmers from going bankrupt, the program also kept the farmers from ever making much money, due to the price limiting action resulting from sales of government grain in times of short crops and high prices.

            A typical grain farmer might own a fifty percent equity in his farm, with the other half owned by the banks.  And every year he would take out an operating loan to plant his crops, and hope to pay it off at harvest. Over the years, the general tendency was to sink deeper and deeper in debt, although this was often offset by gradually increasing land prices, so that a farmer’s actual net equity value could increase, even as his indebtedness grew.  Yet once in a generation, a spike in farm prices might be so high that many farmers might pay off their entire debt in a single year—and then spend the next generation borrowing again.   Critics of the price stabilization plan argued that by limiting the price spikes, the program had eliminated any possibility of a farmer ever paying off the debts and owning his own land.   Interestingly, the critics' objection was not that government had regulated prices badly, but that they had done so at all.  Conservatives argued that farming had always been a wild gamble, and government should step aside and let winners win and losers lose. 

            In recent years, administrations of both parties have bowed to conservative pressure and tried to quietly get the government out of the grain business.  They did this not by enacting any statutory changes that would end the commodity loan program, but rather by setting the loan rate so far below market price than no one would use this program.  Then, as existing stocks were sold off (grain can be stored for a long time—but not forever) the bins were finally empty. 

            So, if the government no longer stores grain, then who does?  Actually, no one stores any great amount.  Corn (maize) stores are now at a record low, and it will be September before this year’s crop of North American corn will be harvested, by which time we will have less than an eighteen day supply. Wheat and soybean reserves are also at record or near record lows.  With corn at over $7.00 per bushel, farmers are making record profits and land values are going through the roof.  Mr. Guebert says some Iowa farm land has sold for $14,000 per acre.  This is a triumph of free market economics, right?  So, what happens if we have a severe drought in the northern hemisphere, or perhaps a volcanic eruption?   With essentially no food in storage, what happens to the world’s seven billion people if little or no food can be produced for a year or two? One can argue that farming should or should not be a gamble.   But should eating be a gamble?

Gardening in a Currier and Ives World

Part One:  Living in the Country

            I live in Northeast Iowa, about 25 miles from town.  Except for a small country church across the road, I am surrounded by cornfields.  I live in an abandoned school building which was built in 1915, and which sits on a five acre plot.  Those five  acres were intended not only to provide a playground for the children, but also a place for horses, as many of the students in 1915 would have arrived by horse drawn buggies. 

            I deliberately allowed some of the acreage to revert to trees.   At 42.5 degrees north latitude and with 35 inches of rainfall per year, any ground not mowed, grazed, or burned will soon grow up in trees. It was barren of trees when the white man first came here, but only because the native peoples had regularly burned it off so as to cause new growth of tender shoots of grass that would attract the herds of buffalo which they hunted.  I occasionally mow about three acres with the tractor, and then allow it to remain fallow as prairie. I do these things to make a place for wildlife, both plants and animals.  And I also grow vegetables on about three quarters of an acre. It’s a pretty place, especially in winter.  Sometimes when I look out the window on a snowy day, my world looks like a Currier and Ives print.

            But there are disadvantages to living this far from town.  There is no municipal sewer or water supply, so I need my own water system and septic tank.  We have electric power and a phone line, but there is no cable service, either for cable TV or a broadband computer link. (I use an “air card,” which I presume to mean that data are transmitted one byte at a time via carrier pigeon.)  But the main disadvantage is that one consumes a lot of fuel commuting to work in town. Today I’m retired, but for many years the fuel which conveyed my wife and me to work consumed a significant part of our income.  And even today, my groceries, medical care, and social connections are at the other end of a long and fuel-intensive road.  When I bought the place in 1969, fuel was cheap and few people besides M. King Hubbert had realized that the world would soon start to run short of petroleum, and almost no one anywhere suspected that burning carbon was affecting the climate. By the oil crisis of 1973, this had changed-- but by then I had invested all that I own into this little patch of ground.  For years I felt guilty about the fuel I consumed, yet selling the place to someone else would only transfer the fuel use problem to someone else, not actually reduce it.  I tried to minimize the problem by driving a fuel efficient car.  I owned VWs, a Ford Escort, and today I have a tiny Chevy Metro that gives me 44 miles per gallon.  And I have always tried to strategically plan my trips to town so as to eliminate unnecessary trips.  Someday soon, plug-in hybrids will be cheap enough so that we can all have one, and Iowa already leads all other states in the percentage of power produced by wind. We could eventually have almost 100% of our electricity from renewables.  When that day comes, if I’m still alive, I will drive without guilt, as my driving will pollute nothing and consume nothing.

            Of course, there are other disadvantages to a rural address.  When my wife and I were still working, every winter was a death-defying struggle.  Several days a month we would risk our lives as we set out on snow and ice covered roads.  Fortunately, in forty years there was only one serious ice-related accident and no one was hurt.  We were lucky.

            Yet, besides the rural solitude, there is an advantage to a place in the country.  You can grow some of you own food--and we always have.

Part Two: Growing Your Own Food.

            The advantage of raising a large vegetable garden is not that you save a great deal of money.  You probably save a little, but not enough to be worth bothering with.  The advantages are that you get much better food, and get it more sustainably.   The average American meal has been hauled 1,400 miles. Some of it goes by rail, but most of it is shipped via refrigerated diesel trucks.  This is a very fuel-intensive way of obtaining our vegetables, and some day this fuel won’t be available. We can respond by shipping more by rail, which is how we used ship this food. But much of it will have to be produced locally, so we may as well begin the culture of food self-sufficiency now.  Iowa is a net food exporting region.  What we mostly export is meat and corn fed to animals to produce that meat, although we also grow soybeans eaten by both humans and animals.   But the fruits and vegetables eaten by most Iowans are grown in California, Texas, and Mexico.

            Before telling you why the things you grow will be better, let me explain why they won’t be cheaper.   America already has the cheapest and most abundant food supply in the world.  The only Americans who have problems buying enough food are those with little or no income, or those who pay an absurdly high percentage of their income on housing or medicine.  Americans spend a lower proportion of their income on food than any country in the world.  If you doubt this, visit any country in Europe.  Whether you buy prepared food or groceries, every meal costs about twice what you would pay in the U.S.   Not all parts of the U.S. have the same prices.  Food in large cities like New York will be pricier, and the same pattern holds in Europe.  But on average, food costs double in Europe. 

            There are many reasons why we have cheap food.  One reason is the U.S. has 30% of the world’s arable land and less than 5% of the world’s people.  America has exported food for over 200 years.  Another reason is that America was the first to industrialize its agriculture and the first to establish colleges of agricultural technology.  We also have the kind of terrain where large scale farming operations are possible.   One wheat farmer in Kansas can grow enough wheat to feed 200-400 people, and our livestock production is also highly industrialized.  Yet there is another reason why food is cheap.  Our vegetables are grown in places like California and Texas where immigrant labor toils to harvest food at much lower wages than are paid to most of the people who eat it. This is a national shame and should be corrected, yet if and when it is corrected, food will cost more—not less.  Also, the large farming operations in the Central Valley of California are irrigated by water that is provided by the government at less than its true cost, and that may not be sustainable much longer anyway. So while the American food supply is cheap, it is not without problems.  It is produced at a high fuel cost, a high environmental cost, and in the case of immigrant labor, a high social cost.  Our other problem is that industrialization of the food supply has given us foods that are increasingly unappetizing, unhealthy, and even unsafe to eat.  

            An article in the Sep 2005 issue of  Life Extension Magazine pointed out that most American vegetables have only about half the nutritional value of food grown a generation ago.  As plant breeders have selectively bred vegetables for high yield, for a firm texture that makes them easier to ship, and for bright color that makes them attractive to buyers, they have also bred out some of the flavor and vitamin content.  The same chemicals in a plant that provide flavor also provide most of the vitamins.  So if the tomato you buy is as firm as a tennis ball, then it probably tastes like a tennis ball and has about as many vitamins as a tennis ball. 

            Another problem is that commercial production of fruits and vegetables relies on chemical fertilizer, so it’s not likely that these foods have much mineral content.  Dr. Joel Wallach, a longtime advocate of mineral supplements, says that whenever the same crop is repeated year after year, the soil becomes depleted of minerals in just a couple of decades.  Most American crop land has been tilled for at least a century and some for over 300 years.   As soil becomes depleted, farmers add fertilizer, but all they add is nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, and occasionally calcium.  That’s just four minerals—but the human body needs at least thirty minerals, according to Dr. Wallach. Using animal waste provides these minerals, but the commercial products do not.  Dr. Wallach claims that Americans have much more serious health problems from mineral shortage than from vitamin shortage.  I take a multi-mineral supplement every day, but I still prefer to eat food with a normal mineral content because the supplements I take will address only those needs which we have thus far identified. Natural food can provide a lot of things which we probably need, but do not yet know that we need.

            Commercial production also relies on chemical weed control and pest control.  Most pesticides are nerve poisons which kill insects on contact and frequently injure farm workers exposed to them.  So why would it be safe for humans to eat this stuff?

            Buying from local, organic growers can reduce the number of miles your food has been trucked, can limit your exposure to pesticides, and can give you food with a normal mineral content. But as for vitamins and taste, buying local may not help much.  Why?  Because small, local growers have the same dilemma as the large commercial operations.  To make a profit, they need to plant cultivars that mature quickly, yield heavily, and that are firm enough to be trucked.  So they end up planting the same varieties of “tennis ball” tomatoes as the commercial growers.  If you want good tasting, nutritious food, you have to grow it yourself. And even the seed you plant will have to be ordered from a catalogue, because your local garden shop probably won’t even stock any varieties worth eating.  Since sugar enhanced varieties of sweet corn were introduced, most young adults have never tasted an ear of corn that actually tastes like corn.  If you want to know what sweet corn used to taste like, plant a patch of Early Golden Bantam, or Iochief.  Then grill it slowly, in the husk.  Your barbecue guests will secretly feed your steak to your dog and stand in line to get more corn.

The Last of the Bananas

                     Bananas around the world are dying.

                  There’s an article in the Jan 10, 2011 issue of New Yorker magazine by Mike Peed entitled “We Have No Bananas.”  It happens that 99% of all bananas produced for export are of a single cultivar—the Cavendish.  And a fungus which attacks and kills this variety, called Tropical Race Fungus Four (TRF-4) is spreading worldwide. This pathogen has already wiped out the plantations of Asia and has spread to Australia.  Most experts agree that it’s only a matter of time before it becomes established in Latin America.  (Technically, a “banana tree” is not actually a tree—but I will call it a tree for this post.)

                  How did the industry become dependent on a single cultivar?  There are over 1000 varieties of banana.  But most are wild bananas whose fruit is tiny, filled with seeds, and in most cases inedible.  And most of the domesticated varieties are sterile, which makes cross breeding nearly impossible, and most are either too fragile to ship, too small, or can be eaten only if cooked.  The Cavendish is the only game in town.

                  No chemical spray or antibiotic has any effect on this fungus.   TRF-4 kills banana trees by entering the root system and then invading cells and switching on a gene already present within the cell, causing the cell to commit suicide, through apoptosis (programmed cell death).  The fungus then feasts on the dead cells, continuing until the tree trunk is consumed from within.  Yet apoptosis is a common defense mechanism which most organisms possess.  If something goes wrong with a cell, the cell is supposed to remove itself and make room for its replacement, or at least remove itself before the problem spreads to the rest of the organism.  Yet TRF-4 turns this defense against its owner.

                  The only way to stop the disease would be to start growing varieties that have natural resistance to it. To do this would mean finding a wild plant, preferably a banana plant, that has resistance, and then cross this plant with a Cavendish or some other marketable variety—to somehow insert a gene that tells the cells not to kill themselves.  But crossing anything with the Cavendish might not be possible because the Cavendish is sterile.  It bears fruit without fertilization, and it produces no seeds.  (In fact, its lack of seeds is what makes it marketable).  It is sterile because it has three sets of chromosomes. It is a triploid.  It originated from an accidental cross between two normal, seed producing wild varieties.  New Cavendish trees are grown from suckers which remain when a banana tree is cut down.

                  Although Alexander the Great introduced some kind of banana to Europe in 327 BC, the banana as we know it was brought to the United States in 1870.  The cultivar was from Jamaica and was called the Gros Michel. It was well received and by 1910 Americans were eating 40 million bunches a year, and vast tracts of South American jungle had been planted with Gros Michel bananas.  But in the mid 1920s, these plantations were being attacked by a fungus, TRF-1, and in about thirty years they were mostly destroyed.   What saved the industry was the Cavendish.  This plant, growing in the private greenhouse of the Duke of Devonshire, was from a cutting in a nineteenth century garden in China. 

                  The Cavendish was in most ways less desirable than Gros Michel.  The fruit was harder to ship, spoiled more quickly, was less tasty, required artificial ripening with ethylene gas, and the plants required heavy pesticide use.  But it was resistant to Tropical Race Fungus One, so it was used.  If only the Cavendish were also resistant to Tropical Race Fungus Four.   Eighty-seven percent of all bananas grown are not for export.  They are eaten locally, and they are of many different cultivars, so fungus is not much of a problem. 

                  In 1960, United Fruit Company, seeing that a replacement for the Cavendish would eventually be needed, opened a research center in Honduras, headed by Phil Rowe.  They hoped to develop a cultivar that would be marketable, shippable,  could be grown efficiently, and would be fungus resistant.  After 40 years of effort, Mr. Rowe had made little progress, and in 2001, he hanged himself.  The center he founded is now a non-profit and is continuing his work, headed by Juan Fernando Aguilar. They are still using conventional plant breeding techniques and have not lost hope.  But plant breeding with plants presumed to be sterile is not easy.  About one Cavendish banana out of every 10,000 will actually produce a seed, if you expose Cavendish plants to massive amounts of wild pollen.  So you must sort through tons of banana pulp, running it all through a sieve to find that one seed, and then get it to grow.

                  In Brisbane, Australia, a team led by James Dale of Queensland University of Technology is trying to solve the problem with genetic engineering. They hope to find a plant with resistance to TRF-4, and splice its resistance gene into a common soil bacterium. Then they will allow the bacterium to invade banana cells in a culture, so as to place the gene within the banana cell. They will then kill the bacterium with an antibiotic.   If a live plant could then be cultured from this altered cell, they will have what they want.

                  But even if they succeed, they will still have two problems:  First, present technology would only allow a transgenic plant in which the foreign genes would be expressed throughout the whole plant, not just in the roots.  So it’s not clear that the resulting fruit would be demonstrably safe to eat. (And even if it could be proven safe, most consumers might wish to avoid it.)  Second, we would still have the main problem, which is monoculture.  These fungi have been around for thousands of years.  As long as banana trees were scattered throughout the jungle, no one fungus that specialized in attacking one kind of plant could ever become a pandemic. But when the same cultivar is planted for thousands of square miles, then once a pathogen gets started there is nothing in its path to stop it.

                  

China Grain Imports to Rise Sharply.

    According to a report in Dec 10, Wall Street Journal,  Rabobank Group predicts that in the next few years, China's imports of corn (maize) will increase from the present 1.3 million metric tons (51 million bushels)  to over 25 million metric tons, making China the world's largest grain importer.  Corn prices over the past year have already increased 60%, to over $5.60, and reserves are now at a low level.  Some analysts predict that corn could reach $7.00 per bushel this spring if China increases imports. All this would be good news for corn farmers and for the economy of entire corn-farming regions--bad news for people who want to eat corn-fed beef or make cheap ethanol.  ( Rabobank Group is a global agribusiness lending concern, based in Utrecht, Netherlands. )

Peak Phosphorous; Another Resource War

     Farm columnist Alan Guebert said in his September 30th column that our next strategic problem might be phosphorous.  He quotes C. Robert Taylor of Auburn University, who says that the global phosphorus market is, "the gravest strategic issue facing the United States that you've never heard of."
    At current usage rates, the U.S. supply will be exhausted in 15 to 20 years.   After that, who owns and controls the remaining world supply of phosphorous may matter more than who controls the remaining oil.  China and Morocco together hold 60% of the world supply, and the U.S., South Africa,  and Jordan hold the rest.   China imposes a 100 to 175% tax on phosphorous exports.  And trade in phosphorous is dominated by just three corporations:  Cargill,  Potash of Saskatchewan, and a private Moroccan monopoly.  Which raises the question that perhaps BHP's real reason for wanting control of Potash of Saskatchewan--is for its phosphorous.

How NAFTA Imperils the Corn Genome

                            

                  In the July 5^th issue of Nation Magazine is an article by Peter Canby entitled “Retreat to Subsistence,” which lays out in detail how NAFTA is destroying Mexico’s indigenous corn farmers, and also destroying the genetic diversity of the corn genome which these farmers are preserving.                    According to Canby, corn worldwide now produces more food than any other crop. About 9,000 years ago, Indians in the highlands of southern Mexico began deliberately selectively breeding a wild grass called teosinte, and over several millennia coaxed it into the plant we call corn (maize) today. 

                   Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Guerrero are where corn was domesticated, and where its wild ancestors still survive. The Indians who accomplished this feat, mostly Zapotecs and Mixtecs, still live there and still practice the plant science of their ancestors.  Farming tiny family plots by hand, their standard of living has never been high, but until NAFTA, the Mexican government subsidized them.

                  But in the 1990s, the Government of Carlos Salinas De Gortari decided to slash the safety net and throw Mexico open to free trade. The thinking was partly economic and partly anti-indigenous politics. They asked, “Why should the rest of Mexican society support Indians in a life of primitive agriculture that will never really free them from poverty?”  So they deliberately pulled the rug out from under these people, first by ending all subsidies, and then allowing imported corn from the U.S. , under NAFTA, to undermine the price of local corn.  The idea was to force peasants off their tiny plots of land and into the cities where they would all be employed in the bonanza of industrial jobs which NAFTA would provide.  But it didn’t work.

                  A few maquiladora plants were built by corporations who then abandoned them for China. Even if these jobs had stayed in Mexico, it is unlikely that the jobs created could have fed the 15 million people forced off the land, and the Mexican government surely knew this. What happened is that 500,000 Mexicans per year illegally entered the U.S., and that may have been part of the plan.  David Barkin, author of Sin Mais, no Hay Pais, an essay critical of NAFTA, at that time spoke to a political scientist specializing in Mexico, and was told, “They have no clear idea where all these people will go.  My guess is they’re thinking Los Angeles.” The government figured, “Who cares?  Once they’re out of Mexico, they’re somebody else’s problem.”  

                  But as peasants flowed out of Mexico, corn flowed in—including hybrid, genetically modified corn.   Though intended as animal food, some of this corn was planted all over Mexico, including areas where corn originated, and where the plant’s only reservoir of genetic diversity is preserved.  Major Goodman, professor of plant science at U. of North Carolina and a leading expert in corn genetics, says that there is very little genetic diversity in commercial corn. He says, “We’re basically looking at about seven in-bred lines and the derivatives of those lines.”   He believes we are with corn about where the Irish were with potatoes, just before the famine.

                   As climate changes, changing moisture conditions will give rise to all kinds of new blights and fungus assaults, and none of our commercial varieties will have any resistance to them.  We will need to crossbreed our corn with strains that confer resistance, and only one place on Earth has a storehouse of genetic diversity broad enough to be of any use.  That place is the highlands of south Mexico where corn originally grew wild, and where traditional farmers still preserve 59 distinct cultivars, (landraces.)

                  But the Mexican government deliberately encouraged farmers to abandon traditional cultivars and plant modern hybrids. Even those who refused now have neighbors planting these imports, so the pollen mixes these genes into their corn anyway. The studies done in the United States on keeping GMO corn isolated really do not apply to the kind of corn farming done by the Zapotecs. Here, we plant hybrids, and next year, we plant more hybrids. Any mistake, even a disastrous one, only has effects which last one plant-harvest cycle.   But the Indians plant open pollinated corn and save seed for next year’s planting. A Zapotec farmer is not a seed company customer; he is a highly skilled plant breeder, and an heir to a 9,000 year culture of plant breeding.

                    A Zapotec farmer examines his whole crop—plant by plant—ear by ear—to identify those plants with superior qualities.  He not only saves seed, but exchanges it with neighboring farms.  So any foreign genes which invade a single field can become permanently and irremovably intermixed with the corn genome of the entire region.

                  In the late 1990s, Zapotec farmers asked Ignacio Chapela and David Quist, of the University of California at Berkeley, to test their corn for GMOs.  The tests were not only positive, but indicated that the inserted genes were not stable but had fragmented and were migrating to different parts of the genome than where they had originally been inserted. Chapela and Quist published a paper in Nature, and a firestorm ensued.  And the fact that the department which employed them had accepted millions of dollars from Novartis did not help matters.

                  As more studies began to confirm Chapell and Quist’s findings, Mexican environmental groups petitioned The Commission for Environmental Cooperation to study the matter. The CEC’s report; Maize and Biodiversity: The Effects of Transgenic Maize in Mexico appeared in 2004, along with 10 beautifully written background chapters.  This background material examined the social, political, and ecological value of Mexico’s indigenous cornfields, and how genetically modified genes might flow through those fields.  Timothy Wise, of Tufts University says this study “….is the best study of gene flow to date.”

                  The report said that we really don’t know what might happen, but that it could easily be a catastrophe for the genetic diversity of the world’s corn.  The commission recommended that, as a precaution, all corn entering Mexico should be ground at the border, but this has never been implemented.  The Bush administration was furious with this report.  Judith Ayers, a Bush appointee at the EPA appended her own negative comments to the report, and completely suppressed the background chapters.  However, the article in Nation provides a URL where this information can be seen.

                  Since NAFTA, to the surprise of the government planners, many indigenous farmers have elected to withdraw from the economy, stop buying fertilizer, and subsist on corn grown for their own table and bartering. But this retreat into subsistence will leave them in absolute poverty.  In 2003, the World Bank said that 40% of Mexicans live in poverty, but that in Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Guerrero, 70% live in extreme poverty.  Now, with the U.S. economy in deep recession, some displaced farmers who came illegally to the U.S. are returning home.  Yet with no subsidy and the price of corn still depressed by cheap imports, subsistence is the only kind of farming they can go back to.  Life was never easy for these people.   But NAFTA has managed to make it worse.

Peak Potassium: The Next Resource War

            According to an article in Aug 19, Wall Street Journal, this week saw a hostile 38 billion dollar takeover bid by Anglo-Australian mining giant BHP-Billiton for control of Potash Corp of Saskatchewan.   This shocked investors around the world, because this event might be the opening gun of the next global “resource war.”

            In his 2001 book, Hubbert’s Peak, Geologist Ken Deffeyes points out that peak oil is merely the first of many resource peaks.  He observed that in the future, many vital commodities will see production peak and then enter a long, slow, irreversible decline as consumers across the globe scramble to grab their share of a diminishing supply.  He cited potassium as the next commodity in line after oil.

            We will not actually run out of potassium---it’s fairly plentiful.   What we will run out of are deposits that are sufficiently concentrated that they can be mined efficiently.    The richest such deposit is in Saskatchewan.  According to Deffeyes, the known reserves worldwide could last up to 200 years at the present rate of extraction.  However, as world population expands and as the “green revolution” replaces traditional agriculture, the amount of potassium fertilizer consumed will not remain constant—it will expand exponentially.

            And a potassium shortage will be much more serious than an oil shortage. We can develop substitute strategies for energy, but potassium is a part of our bodies, and part of the plant tissues that feed our bodies.  The next time some moron tells you that we needn’t worry about running out of our natural resources because we humans are infinitely clever and can find a substitute for anything,  ask him how he will maintain the electrolytic balance in the tissues of his body (essentially, the sodium/potassium balance) without potassium.  Without this mineral, we die.   Modern commercial farmers add nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, (and calcium in the form of ag-lime) to their fields.  No modern food crop is possible without them.

            About the same time as I was reading Hubbert’s Peak, I came across something by Dr. Joel Wallach, a naturopathic physician who had written a series of lectures about the mineral-deficient American diet, and the probable health consequences of this mineral insufficiency.  Wallach is a controversial figure with an interesting background.  Before getting a license to practice medicine he was a very successful veterinarian.  As part of an environmental study, he performed autopsies on thousands of zoo animals who had died for no apparent reason.  He discovered, to his horror, that in almost every case, the cause of death was a diet insufficient in some critical mineral.  But the animals were being fed unsold produce from the local supermarkets.  They were eating what we were eating—and it was killing them.

            Before Dr. Wallach had become a veterinarian, he had been an agronomist, specializing in soil fertility. This gave Wallach a better perspective on the causes of the decline in the mineral content of our diet. Wallach explains, “Every plant is a little mining machine.”  Its roots suck minerals out of the soil and send them to the rest of the plant.  If the plant is then eaten by animals whose droppings fall back to the soil and whose bodies decay into the soil, then the minerals remain in place.  If the ground is farmed by subsistence farmers who live on the land and consume everything they grow, and who spread both human and animal wastes on the fields, then the result is the same. The minerals never leave the farm. But with the rise of urbanization, crops are consumed far from where they are grown.  Sewage is treated and then flows into rivers, and to the ocean--and the cycle is broken. 

            Wallach says that you only have to farm the same field for about 15 years before most of the minerals are gone.  Most American crop and grazing land has now been used for over 100 years, and some land has been used nearly 400 years.  Farmers add nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and lime---and that seems to make the plants grow.  But according to Wallach, we need at least a couple dozen other minerals for optimum health.   Dr. Wallach cites a government document (U. S. Senate Document # 264, 74^th Congress, 2^nd session, 1936) which warned even in 1936 that all of our crop and grazing land was seriously depleted in minerals.    It concluded that eventually every American would need to take a multi-mineral supplement every day, or we would suffer an epidemic of mineral deficiency diseases.  But this study was forgotten, and no action was ever taken.  What of the predicted epidemic?  Wallach says it’s here.   He cites the growing problem with type II diabetes and obesity as an example.  He says chromium and vanadium are needed to properly metabolize carbohydrates.  Without adequate chrome, the body has to make additional insulin, which eventually triggers insulin resistance.  He points out that farm animals also get type II diabetes, but about 30 years ago we began adding chrome and vanadium to their feed, and the problem completely disappeared.

            But even if we take our multi-mineral pills, we will still need to grow plants to produce carbohydrate and protein--and massive amounts of potassium will be needed to do this.  As world supplies become radically more expensive, third world farmers will be priced out of the market, and will have to retreat back into subsistence agriculture. Unfortunately, these countries have allowed their population to expand far beyond the numbers that this kind of agriculture and its low yields can support.

            Minerals are the currency of life.  When can we expect the final struggle for these life-sustaining elements to begin?  Apparently, it already has.